Why we need Canada

The Canadian connection

by Joe Scott, international conservation director, from the Spring 2009 Conservation Northwest Quarterly

As wildlife biologist Jeff Lewis opened the door of a simple wooden carry box, a blur of bounding motion and brown ball of fur and muscle charged into the dense brush of the Queets Valley in Olympic National Park. The entire scene, lorded over by the Queets’ massive snow and moss-draped maples, was over in about the time it’s taken for your financial portfolio to resemble your child’s piggybank. Since 2008, nearly half of the Pacific fishers planned for release have been set free into ancient forests of the park where they’ve been missing for decades. It’s part of a reintroduction plan led by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and others, including Conservation Northwest.

Throughout Washington’s forests, fishers—once ubiquitous forest predators—have been absent since the 1930s, wiped out by decades of trapping and clearcut logging of their old-growth forest habitats. With somewhat cartoonish looks (like a cross between a raccoon and a strange little British dog) and choice of residence (it lives in hollows in old trees), the fisher makes its living preying on a variety of small animals, but particularly it relishes porcupines, the archenemy of car tires and outhouses everywhere. In fact, fishers seem to be the only effective natural control of porcupines, an herbivore little loved by foresters for the damage they can cause to seedlings and young trees.

First fishers, then wolves

On the leeward side of the North Cascades, a couple hundred miles to the east as the crow flies, Scott Fitkin, another wildlife biologist, and his crew are radio tracking a new wolf pack that showed up last year in the Methow River valley. 

Gray wolves made a dramatic appearance in the heart of the North Cascades this past summer where they appeared on motion sensing remote cameras deployed by Conservation Northwest in wildlife hot spots in the Cascades. Reproducing wolves have not been documented in the Cascades in more than 70 years.    

Nearly everyone was taken by surprise by the images of a male and female actually taken on private land in the Methow River tributary—everyone but Scott Fitkin, that is, who has been the agency’s carnivore point person in the valley for the past 15 plus years. “In the early 1990s almost from the get-go we were getting reports of wolf sightings, including a howling response from an adult and pups south of Hozomeen,” says Fitkin. “About the same time we had reports of wolves in the upper Twisp. Yet we were unable to verify those sightings—until now.” 

Conservationists had been discussing options for transplanting wolves back to their native Washington habitat for years. Wolf restoration efforts in Yellowstone National Park and the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho have been remarkable success stories in terms of actually reestablishing wolf populations and understanding the complex influences the animals have on the entire system. In 2008, the Department of Fish and Wildlife convened a stakeholder group to draft a management plan in anticipation of wolves showing up in eastern Washington as they disperse from Idaho. That management plan is currently out for peer review and should be out to the public sometime this summer.

Yet not many people expected them to show up on their own so soon, so far west, and, of all places, in the Methow Valley.  As if to crown their own North Cascades debut, the wolf pair showed up again on camera in June with six pups. Even Fitkin was pleasantly surprised this time as there hasn’t been any evidence of reproducing Cascades wolves in the past seven decades. Persecution and government bounties had seen to that.

Times have changed

The reintroduction of fisher and natural return of wolves: The symbolism of these two apparently unrelated events is inescapable. Time has changed human attitudes dramatically toward natural systems, and toward carnivores specifically, in the last few decades.
The idea that we can pluck pieces of nature from a park or wilderness and still call it “wild” is ludicrous. If an ecosystem has evolved with wolves or bears as players, removing them has profound effects on that system.

Fishers and wolves, like any other naturally occurring animals, play key ecological roles in their environments. They are critical pieces that together with hundreds of other plant and animals form the complex ecological puzzles that Conservation Northwest and others are trying to maintain in our parks and wilderness areas.

The Yellowstone wolf transplants, pioneers in a sense, provide a dramatic, exhaustively documented example of the multiple and complex effects a large predator can have on its environment—what biologists refer to as a “trophic cascade.”

The return of wolves to the park sparked a domino effect in our crown jewel of a national park, almost entirely by influencing the behavior and over-abundance of elk. A recent study in Olympic National Park by Oregon State biologists has documented far-reaching ecosystem changes in the park since wolves were killed off in the early 1900s. Lack of wolves led to a boom in elk populations, the overbrowsing of shrubs and tree saplings, and erosion so severe it has profoundly altered the streams and rivers in the Olympics.

Mother lode of wildlife

But the story of the return of wolves and fishers to Washington has another side—their source. These animals didn’t just come from outer space, nor were they part of a zoo’s captive breeding program.

They all came from Canada.

So did the wolves that naturally recolonized northwest Montana and those that were transplanted into Idaho. So did the lynx that were successfully transplanted into Colorado. Moose are making a dramatic comeback in the Pacific Northwest as well, immigrants from north of the border.

British Columbia is like a wild animal factory.

It’s entirely possible that grizzly bear recovery in Washington’s Cascades and Selkirks will hinge on the movement of bears into the state from coastal and interior BC, since the US government is doing little to grow our desperately endangered Washington populations.

Canada lynx are in a similar situation. The southern extreme of their range exists as boreal forest “fingers” that extend into the northern tier of the lower 48 states. Boreal forests are typified by the presence of snow for at least five to six months of the year.

The rarest of North America’s endangered large mammals—mountain caribou—only exist in the lower 48 because they were transplanted into north Idaho in the ‘80s and ‘90s from British Columbia after dwindling down to a handful of animals. Their continued existence is almost entirely dependent on BC recovery efforts.

Wolverines have been reappearing in high forested areas in the contiguous 48 states and in the Midwest. Wolverines in Washington have been shown to travel back and forth across the border and may owe their existence in our state to having been part of larger Canadian populations that have persisted after US animals were largely trapped out. We may never know.

But one thing is abundantly clear: Without the vast largely unpopulated places in British Columbia and beyond, we Americans who love wildlife would be left with not much more than wishes and what ifs.

Not that BC or Canada as a whole has done such a great job protecting their wildlife and wilderness. On the contrary, many developing countries have done a better job. It’s simply that there’s lots of Canada and few Canadians—and most of those 30 million people are concentrated in the east and south and in big cities like Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto.

That means a whole lot of room for critters. 

The US in contrast has a population approaching 300 million on a smaller and more developed land base than Canada.

The point is that Canada and British Columbia, despite some very regressive forestry, land use, and endangered species policies, have been a source of animal colonists for some of the rarest wildlife species in the US.

The climate card

Now, however, wildlife demographic trends may become more muddled as climate change related habitat influences, like fire and disease, become more pronounced. Some snow-dependent animals including wolverine, lynx, and caribou may find that they need larger home ranges and more extensive movement corridors to persist. The ranges of many birds, including those that are old forest dependent, like northern goshawk, may shift northward.  
More than ever the US and Canada are ecologically inseparable as habitat disturbances due to climate change accelerate. 

“The fossil record tells us that most species have adjusted to past climate changes not by in situ evolution, but by changes in distribution through dispersal. The best way to provide connectivity at a regional scale is to maintain intact networks of protected lands,” says Reed Noss, conservation biologist.

People close to the issue think that there should be closer coordination between Canada and US with regard to wildlife habitat connectivity as the stressors on wildlife populations increase.

Maintaining habitat connectivity within Canada to the Cascades and the Northern Rockies and between these mountain ranges in the US is critically important for sustaining a number of wildlife species,” says Gary Koehler, wildlife research scientist and lynx expert with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“This linkage is particularly important for large carnivores like wolves and grizzly bears as well as rare boreal species that reside at the southern edge of their range, like lynx, boreal chickadees, and boreal owls, as well as perhaps plant and animal species not yet documented,” continues Koehler. “Working with our colleagues in Canada to maintain corridors for dispersal is an urgent need, particularly when faced with the uncertainty that global climate change may bring.”

Canada is our biggest trading partner. They send us oil, gas, lumber, hockey teams, and comedians. We send them tourists, beef, produce, and gangstas. 

Now we’ve added endangered animals to the trade imbalance. However, in the coming decade many species may find it necessary to move northward again. The US and Canada must come up with a cooperative strategy that allows wildlife the freedom to roam in response to climate related habitat changes and continued development pressures.

We may be two countries, but to grizzly bears and boreal owls, there’s just one ecosystem. It’s tough to distinguish between a Canadian wolverine and an American one—they both go wherever they want and neither of them has any manners. But climate is a new ballgame and the rules are unclear.

Maybe there should be a NAFTA for wildlife? How about a Canada/US Focal Species Homeland Security Department? We’re not talking about decriminalizing pot here or a common standard for greenhouse gases. Those are the tough issues. Protecting our shared wildlife should be easy.